On Thanksgiving

Let me tell you a story.

It's a very Bahamian thing to do, you know, tell people stories. I could start mine in a number of ways. I could, for instance, start like this:

I'll tell you a story bout Jackinanory …

or I could start like this:

It once was a time a very fine time
the monkey chew tobacco and he spit white lime…

The point is, it's a Bahamian thing to do, to tell people stories. Remember that for later.

Anyway, here's mine. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a class — a very large class of sophisticated, well-employed people. It so happened that I was giving a test on a Thursday evening near the end of November. I announced my intention a week or so in advance. In the class before the night of the test, a stream of people, one after another, came up to me. Every single one of them had the same request: could we postpone the test? The reason being given was simple. Thursday was Thanksgiving, and they were going to be on holiday, eating their Thanksgiving turkeys somewhere that was not the class.

Now, being a good Bahamian — I watched our flag going up that flagpole at midnight on July 10, 1973, and I saw the blessing the Good Lord sent down upon it, stirring the air around it so that it opened out in a soft breeze that had not touched the Union Jack until that point — I flatly refused. My students were horrified.

"Are you American?" I asked them. "Do you have dual citizenship?"

I was truly interested; I don't like people who make assumptions, and I didn't want to be guilt of one myself.

As I remember it, not one of them was.

"I went to school in the US," said one brave soul.

"Well, I went to school in Canada," said I, "but you don't see me celebrating their Thanksgiving on Columbus Day." (I do not think I said Discovery Day; I don't think I can fix my mouth to say that.)

I then took the stand that if they wanted to pass the class, they had to take the test. The worst thing they could've done was tell me they wanted to go home and celebrate a foreign holiday; it straightened up every patriotic bone in my body. There was a great outcry, but I stuck to my guns.

"If there's one thing I hate," I told them, "it's a group of independent Black people taking over an American holiday."

And it's not as though it's anything to be proud of. Even Americans are learning to be critical of their Thanksgivings. Not that there's anything wrong with giving God thanks; that's what Harvest is for, as my good colleague Sebastian Campbell has already eloquently pointed out. But the implications of Thanksgiving, even for Americans, are pretty iffy, to say the least. They become even more iffy when people whose history is a whole long story of oppression insist on adopting the holiday.

You see, American Thanksgiving is a celebration that remembers the Pilgrim Fathers. Now who were these people? They were a group of white settlers who, fleeing religious persecution in Great Britain, set up camp on a land that was already inhabited. As the story goes, each Thanksgiving was another chance for them to thank the Good Lord for keeping them alive for another year.

On the surface, it doesn't seem all that terrible. But look at it this way.

The Pilgrim Fathers did for the mainland of the USA what Columbus did for our islands. Their settlement, like his landfall, ultimately resulted in the devastation of the populations of native people who occupied, farmed and ruled the land that was North America. Each Thanksgiving, therefore, implies that the Pilgrim Fathers were giving thanks to God for helping them kill off a few more Indians, for helping them take over a little more of the land that belonged to the Six Nations (whose descendants tell us that they celebrate the oldest living participatory democracy on Earth). The states in which the Pilgrim Fathers landed have very few reservations at all; almost all their native people have been assimilated into the dominant, invasive population.

It is for this that we give thanks.

I don't accept it. I was born and grew up among a people for whom oppression is a daily part of life. I don't merely refer to people of African descent; all of us have experienced oppression in one form or another. As inhabitants of a tiny country on the edge of the greatest nation in the world, we are more than familiar with oppression. We should identify with the oppressed everywhere — not with the oppressors.

I believe that those of us who do not carry an American passport but celebrate Thanksgiving like the Americans choose to identify with oppressors. To do so denies our very essence, erases our history a little more. To buy into this holiday, which commemorates people whose settlement of New England began the massacre of the Native peoples of the USA, tells me that we have very little solid sense of self. We ignore the fact that among us still walk Bahamians in whose veins run Native American blood. Some of us — Bowlegs and Wildgooses, among others — still carry Native American names. And for any one of us to celebrate American Thanksgiving on our soil obliterates who we are.

E bo ben, my story done en.
If you ax me for another, I'll tell it again.

On Zero

We're all familiar with the idea of the American Dream. Who isn't? In the musical Miss Saigon, which was written by two Frenchmen about the Vietnamese war, there's a song that bears that name. And for those of us who live on the periphery of that grand ol' country to the north, the American Dream pervades almost every cranny of our reality.

You see, the American Dream is part of the myth of the American nation — the idea that a person can go from rags to riches in the grand ol' USA. And it's a myth that's founded on a sort of reality. Examples of successes abound, from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump and John H. Johnson. We don't talk all that much about the failures.

The idea of the American Dream (let's call it the A.D. from here on in) is a simple one, a strong one. No matter who you are, what you start with, the USA is the Land of Opportunity, the one place in the world where hard work and innovation can move you from nothing to something, can take you from zero to a million in the short space of a lifetime.

What we don't talk much about is the Bahamian Dream.

Thing is, it exists. More than that, it's a far more dramatic reality for the majority of Bahamians than the American Dream could ever be. To hook into the American Dream, we Bahamians would have to emigrate, fight for status, and then dive into that fast-flowing stream that is American business life to struggle with all the other hopefuls to try and come out victors. This doesn't mean that many Bahamians don't partake in the dream; every day young Bahamians leave this country to go (mostly) to the USA, where they believe the opportunities are greater and the possibilities for living out the A.D. more plentiful.

But look at our Dream this way.

The present black Bahamian upper class is comprised of people who were born into poverty, or of people whose parents were raised with next to nothing in their pockets. For some of them, they have gone from zero to a million in the space of three and a half decades — the precise time it's been possible for a Bahamian of any complexion, but especially of African heritage — to participate creatively and meaningfully in the economy. We can name our own successes: entrepreneurs like Tiger Finlayson and Franklyn Wilson and Myles Munroe and Neil Ellis spring immediately to mind.

They are not alone. Between 1967 and now, countless Bahamians of eminently humble backgrounds and limited prospects have drastically improved their standard of living. Men and women who, when they were born, could look forward to little more than a basic education in one of the few public schools have become doctors and lawyers and politicians and preachers and stars.

In June of this year, the Pompey Museum downtown reopened for the first time since the fire of Sepember 2001. In commemoration of the 170th anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in this part of the world, and of the 2nd centenary of the struggle against slavery in general, the first exhibit in that museum featured an actual slave ship that was recovered off the waters of Key West.

If you haven't yet had the chance to visit the Pompey Museum and see the exhibition of the Henrietta Marie, know that it will close at the end of November. And know, too, that if you miss the opportunity to go, the point of this article is going to be blunted in some small way.

You see, the Bahamian Dream is, to my mind, a far, far greater dream than the American one. It's not how far we can go that impresses me; it's how far we have come.

The awful thing about slavery, I believe, isn't the condition in which a slave finds himself. It's the fact that there is no self. Slavery is the institution of taking from a human being the most basic thing that make him human: the right to own himself. The physical conditions that complement slavery are to some degree incidental. Many Bahamian slaves lived in conditions that we might imagine that slaves on the American mainland and the rest of the Caribbean should envy. Not all Bahamian slaves lived on plantations. Those who lived in Nassau might not even live with their masters; some were permitted to live in their own quarters Over the Hill, and they might even have their own plots of land that they could use to grow food.

But their lives were not their own. Nor were their spouses, their children, or their labour. Their apparent material security was fragile. If their master died, or fell upon hard times, they could be sold into a completely different situation. There was no security, no room to plan for the future, no real hope, even, to place faith in the present.

The Bahamian Dream is so powerful, to my mind, because as a society, we started not from zero, but from a negative number. To be a society based on slavery, and whose hierarchies perpetuated the inequalities derived from slavery for another 130 years, and to have created from that a society in which we can grow our own millionaires is a dream indeed.

But let me not sound too smug, It's possible to have a society in which a group of people benefit from a change as fundamental as majority rule, but in which that group do not pass on the benefits to those who come behind. And I believe that, in some ways unlike the USA, we run the risk of becoming that kind of society. The achievements of the first generation of Independence were remarkable; but are we perpetuating them? As I write, too many young Bahamians are choosing not to return home because they are finding our society closed to their contributions. Could it be that the Bahamian Dream is as fragile as a slave's sense of self?